Tuesday, June 17, 2014

If true love is blind, then the deepest and most passionate love
is not only blind: it is also deaf and dumb.

How else can we describe Paul Krugman, Lexington and the
others who are rallying to defend Barack Obama in his time of trouble?

Begin with Krugman.

Don’t worry, Krugman exhorts the faithful, Barack Obama has
been a transformative president. His successes far outweigh the minor
difficulties with the VA, the IRS, Bowe Bergdahl and foreign policy.

Krugman is thrilled that Obama has reformed the health care
system; Obamacare is a rousing success. And Obama has taken decisive steps to save
the planet by issuing mountains of regulations to control climate change.

In other terms, Krugman is thrilled to see Obama’s version
of socialism lite play havoc with the private markets. His passion is such that
he cares not at all for the way the ultimate government-controlled health care
delivery system, the VA, has been run. And he does not mention that premiums
are spiking across the country… surely a drag on the economy and on job
creation.

In Krugman’s view:

You
should judge leaders by their achievements, not their press, and in terms of
policy substance Mr. Obama is having a seriously good year. In fact, there’s a
very good chance that 2014 will go down in the record books as one of those
years when America took a major turn in the right direction.

Anyone who is not blind, deaf and dumb will notice that
Krugman contrasts achievements with press, not successes with failures. For
Krugman, Obama never fails.

As for saving the planet, the largest amount of pollution
comes, not from the United States, but from China. About that, Obama can do
nothing.

We should not ignore the fact that some of the most
important climate scientists, led by MIT emeritus professor Richard Lindzen,
are highly skeptical of the supposedly “settled science” of climate change.

Krugman focuses on America. If you were worrying about the
state of things in the rest of the world, you can turn to the Lexington column in
The Economist and Andrew Sullivan’s blog to learn that Obama’s fecklessness is
really a sign of cool-headed reason.

Sullivan even manages to compare Obama to Dwight Eisenhower
and George H. W. Bush.

It’s astonishing, how blind, deaf and dumb Obama’s lovers
can be. Eisenhower commanded a level of respect that no other recent president
has. When he did not intervene in the French war in Indochina, no one imagined
that he was weak and ineffectual.

When George H. W. Bush managed the collapse of the Soviet
Union, events transpired largely without incident. That, after all, is the sign
of leadership.

Sullivan calls him “no drama Obama” but you have to be
blind, deaf and dumb to imagine that there is no drama in the world today.

The Lexington column describes Obama in these terms:

The
president is an intelligent, rational and rigorous observer of global horrors.
And he is often eloquent in his assessment of why it is folly to think such
problems can be easily or reliably solved by military means alone. Asked about
the sight of Iraqi army units abandoning their posts in the face of smaller
enemy forces, Mr Obama made a good point. If Iraqi troops were not
"willing to stand and fight" against the militant attackers, that
points to a "problem in terms of morale" and commitment that reflects
political divisions in the country. He expressed fears of worsening violence
should Sunni insurgents overrun Shi’ite sacred sites in the country.

His
observations were sound. And here is the frustrating thing about reporting on
this president’s worldview. In and of itself, his cool, cerebral analysis is
often more rational and less hypocritical than the criticism raining down on
him from his political opponents.

It’s nice to know that President Obama is observing global
horrors. It would be nicer if he could exercise some leadership, to prevent
there from being further horrors.

Is Obama really being “more rational and less hypocritical”
than his opponents? It think it fair to say that Republican efforts to offer
policy solutions have largely come up short. It’s what happens when you make
John McCain your foreign policy guru.

But, Lexington does not distinguish between leaders who
really were in charge, like Eisenhower and G. H. W. Bush, where no one
questioned whether or not they were in charge and a president who acts like an
outside observer, whose attitude feels more like Alfred E. Newman: What me
worry?

If no one thinks you have a handle on the situation, if no
one thinks you are in charge, you aren’t in charge. It’s not that difficult to
understand.

Saying that Obama is being rational is pure rationalization.

Krugman understands that Obama does not really care about
foreign policy, but wants his transformative legacy to be about health
insurance reform and climate change regulation. (You will note that Krugman
does not list income redistribution as one of Obama’s great successes.)

One is forced to conclude that Obama has been willing to
sacrifice everything in the name of what he considers to be social justice.

Many astute observers have questioned the optics of Obama’s
most recent foray into fundraising and golf. Andrew Sullivan's faith and love are
sufficiently powerful to rationalize anything:

Which
merely goes to show there is only one grown-up in Washington these days, and
we’re lucky he is in the White House. I was particularly impressed with the
president’s insistence on continuing his California fundraising trip. What he’s
doing by this business-as-usual approach is to try and defuse the Beltway’s
cable-news-driven hysteria of the minute – usually larded up with insane levels
of parochialism and partisanship – so that a saner foreign policy can be
realized.

Large swaths of Iraq have fallen into the hands of
terrorists. The nation of Iraq does not really exist anymore. For Sullivan it’s
all cable-news-driven hysteria.

If we turn to Bret Stephens we see what Sullivan does not
want to see, a world without any leadership at all:

Was it
only 10 months ago that President Obama capitulated on Syria? And eight months
ago that we learned he had no idea the U.S. eavesdropped on Angela Merkel ?
And seven months ago that his administration struck its disastrous interim
nuclear deal with Tehran? And four months ago that Chuck Hagel announced that
the United States Army would be cut to numbers not seen since the 1930s? And
three months ago that Russia seized Crimea? And two months ago that John Kerry's
Israeli-Palestinian peace effort sputtered into the void? And last month that
Mr. Obama announced a timetable for total withdrawal from Afghanistan—a
strategy whose predictable effects can now be seen in Iraq?

Even
the Bergdahl deal of yesterweek is starting to feel like ancient history. Like
geese, Americans are being forced to swallow foreign-policy fiascoes at a rate
faster than we can possibly chew, much less digest.

And now, another cool-headed approach to recent events… in
this case events in the Ukraine that no one is covering:

On
Thursday, Russian tanks rolled across the border into eastern Ukraine. On
Saturday, Russian separatists downed a Ukrainian transport jet, murdering 49
people. On Monday, Moscow stopped delivering gas to Kiev. All this is part of
the Kremlin's ongoing stealth invasion and subjugation of its neighbor. And all
of this barely made the news. John Kerry phoned
Moscow to express his "strong concern." Concern, mind you, not condemnation.

It’s nice to see Obama as a rational adult, but he is still
conducting policy:

Here,
then, is the cravenness that now passes for cleverness in this administration:
Make friends with a terrorist regime to deal with a terrorist organization.
Deliver Iraq's Arab Shiites into the hands of their Persian coreligionists, who
will waste no time turning southern Iraq into a satrapy modeled on present-day Lebanon.

Deal
brusquely with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki —who, for all his manifest
shortcomings as a leader nonetheless wishes to be our ally—and obsequiously
with an Iranian regime that spent the better part of the last decade killing
American soldiers. Further alienate panicky allies in Riyadh and Jerusalem for
the sake of ingratiating ourselves with the mullahs.

For now the chaos in the Middle East has only increased the
price of oil to around $106.00 a barrel. If things get worse and the price spikes up
toward $150.00 dreams of social justice will be crashing around our “cool”
president.

Obama might be cool-headed and rational, but his defenders
are driven by their passions.

6 comments:

Apparently if you're rooting for the unlikely success of the United States during the period of time known as "Obama's presidency" you're madly in love.

re: "For now the chaos in the Middle East has only increased the price of oil to around $106.00 a barrel. If things get worse and the price spikes up toward $150.00 dreams of social justice will be crashing around our “cool” president."

Indeed, what if oil prices rise to $150/bbl? The last time we had this happen we considered $40/bbl as "normal" while now $100/bbl is clearly "normal", so we're looking at a 50% rise event rather than a 180% rise event.

President Bush said the war in Iraq wasn't about oil, but clearly it is about oil, and power, and Bush was lying to himself and the American people.

If we don't know how to run an economy on $150/bbl, we're clearly not the most powerful nation on earth, but instead the wimpiest, looking for the slightest excuse to whine about how hard life is in a global economy where we buy things from people willing to be paid $1/day while we need $60/day to be considered the poorest of the poor.

If we have to spend $1 trillion dollar per year to keep peace on earth, we're going to go broke, and it won't be the world's fault.

Keep the cool head Mr. President, there's fools out there who will say anything to weaken the United States, so don't listen to them.

Of course the Iraq War was about oil, whether implicitly or explicitly. People who say "No war for oil!" have no idea what they're talking about. Our economy runs on oil. Fact, not fiction. These are the same people who say no drilling in ANWR because it is a wilderness so beautiful and pristine that they'll never go to it. And we can't drill off the coast of Florida, or California, and, and, and. It's insane. Saying you won't fight a war for resources like oil is like saying you won't fight a war for water.

The United States has been sufficiently weakened on the global stage by Obama. Enough.